Got an A+! Yes! Not a surprise, considering my friends call on me to proofread everything from documents to Dear John letters (really) to business emails.

When my daughter was younger, if someone misused a word in our house (such as, “me and my brother went to Disneyland”) we would look at one another and shout “Grammar Police!!” until the offending sentence was said correctly. It didn’t take long for her friends to jump on the grammar police bandwagon and more than a few of their friends were verbally pounced on amid shrieks and laughter.

Now, at 16, she’s much too cool to play that game, but that doesn’t stop her from occasionally correcting her boyfriend’s poor grammar. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I admit I fill the role of Chief of the Grammar Police and it’s a 24/7 job. One simply cannot turn it on and off at will.

If you gleefully shout, “I do that!” upon reading the following scenarios, then you’re part of the department. Wear your badge proudly.

• You celebrated the 2004 U.S. book release of Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by giving copies to all your friends and business associates, and you secretly feel the author, Lynne Truss, is a long-lost twin separated from you at birth. (Or is it just me? The paternal side of my family is British, after all. Coincidence? Lynne, you know where to find me.)

• Merely walking by a sign in the mall proclaiming “All cd’s and dvd’s now on sale” sends you to Mrs. Fields for some soothing carbs. Or perhaps to Staples for some wite-out for all those misplaced apostrophes. (Come to think of it, even purchasing wite-out is frustrating – why didn’t BIC just name it ‘white-out?’)

• You refuse to shop in the “15 items or less” line at the grocery store because you’re boycotting the sign until it properly reads “fewer.”

• You’re the only one in your circle who sends text messages in grammatically correct sentences with full punctuation. We know that “r u L8 2day?” should never take the place of “You may be running a bit late today due to the rain. Let me know when to expect you.”

• You refuse to walk into a room posting a sign that reads “Parent’s meeting” until they clarify which parent, or do they in fact mean Parents’ meeting, in which case all parents are welcome?

• When you ask a salesclerk how they are and they say, “I’m doing good,” you then ask them if they are helping orphans, working at a soup kitchen, or volunteering some other way in the community. Surely, if they meant “I’m doing well,” they would have answered properly.

• Hearing the word irregardless is like fingernails on a chalkboard to you. Beware the uneducated person who utters this word.

• You recognize the impossibility of a friend who writes, “I’m literally up to my ears in paperwork.” Uhh…sincerely doubt that. She may be metaphorically up to her ears, but “literally” simply cannot be used unless it is true exactly as written.

• You refuse to buy any product that is misspelled on purpose, such as Rice Krispies or Klean Kanteen (I found this product recently when I was looking for reusable water bottles.)

• You use neither spellcheck nor grammar check on your computer. Why would you?

Grammar abuses are rampant. Last year, American Eagle Outfitters was selling a shirt proclaiming, “Love the one your with.” I am flummoxed how something mass produced made it past the designer, the manufacturer, the buyer, the store managers, and onto the chests of our impressionable youth who don’t even realize it’s an error because they themselves don’t know the difference between your and you’re.

It’s an outrage! Why aren’t we writing letters to Congress? Marching on Capitol Hill with our grammatically correct picket signs? Writing concise, perfectly punctuated letters to the editors of our local papers? It’s time to raise our red-pen-holding fists in the air and unite!

But for now, I’m back to Facebook to forward The Ultimate Grammar Quiz to my friends.

Rest easy, America, because the Chief of the Grammar Police and her fellow officers are out there protecting proper usage of the English language—one word at a time!

Provo, UT – January 14, 2010 (PressReleasePivot) — Bill Drew, author of a successful new e-book on writing, ‘The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else’, claims Rhetoric has caused the writing crisis in US public schools. Isn’t that a rather harsh indictment of Rhetoric? “Not really,” said Drew. “What’s the dominant emphasis in teaching essay writing in public schools? Introductions, thesis statements, topic sentences, paragraphs, conclusions – all of those came straight out of Rhetoric. And those are just forms, not content. What if a writer did all those forms right, but the audience had already read the content, the ideas, before? The forms wouldn’t help.”

But forms are necessary, aren’t they? “Yes, you have to have familiar forms to convey new content and new ideas. But Rhetoric doesn’t show you how to create new content.” What about the Topics, the Commonplaces of Rhetoric? “Note that name, ‘Commonplaces’, which means things already shared and already common. Nothing new there, is there?”

So your e-book, ‘The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else’, teaches content but not form? “No, that’s not right. My book teaches BOTH content and form. You see, teaching only the forms of Rhetoric is a little like that famous picture of the six blind men: each blind man feels only a part of the elephant and tries to imagine what the whole is like. In the case of teaching students how to write essays with Rhetoric, teachers make students focus on the parts of an essay without helping them relate to the whole message of the essay, to ‘What’s new to the reader’. I used to do that, too, until I discovered that the OldView – NewView relationship is the whole message – the whole elephant, if you will – in whatever you write, including essays.”

Your focus on the whole instead of the parts sounds very unscientific, Mr. Drew. “On the contrary. For instance, in the 1970s, Physics Professor David Bohm said, ‘We must turn physics around. Instead of starting with parts and showing how they work together, we start with the whole.’ Science has been focusing on the whole first for some time now. Parts are relevant only as they relate to the whole. And the whole in writing is, ‘What’s new to the reader’. Cognitive psychology and linguistics have been moving toward newness and the whole message for some time, now. Writing teachers just haven’t caught on yet.”

How do you think this emphasis mainly on parts happened in writing, anyway? “It started over 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece with the ‘parts emphasis’ in Rhetoric, talking about parts, parts, parts. To be fair, Rhetoric does mention in passing that you have to keep your purpose in mind of persuading your audience, but Rhetoric doesn’t get at all specific about how to do that. It’s simply posturing, really.

“Instead of paying attention to Rhetoric, modern writing teachers should have paid attention to Michel de Montaigne, the Father of the Essay. In the first book ever on essays, Montaigne used the OldView – NewView technique. In each essay, he starts talking about some virtue such as loyalty, mentions what society thinks of it, and then he says, ‘and yet’, which introduces his NewView, which often is a NewView Reverse of society’s view. That was over four hundred years ago, and nobody seems to have noticed but me. If anyone has noticed, it hasn’t made it into the writing textbooks.”

“My company, NewView Options, is trying to turn that around with my new e-book, which is selling well on Amazon.com, and our new computer program to help students create NewView Thesis statements from their own experiences.”

Drew reports that students, teachers, and businessmen have endorsed his book. His company, NewView Options, provides several testimonials on their website, at http://bit.ly/SecretDNAPraises.

Drew’s e-book, ‘The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else,’ is available now online at http://bit.ly/BuySecretDNABook for $8.50. It is also available on Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book for $9.50 (several positive reviews there). The companion software, NewView Essay Services, which automates the thesis-making process in the e-book, is available at http://bit.ly/SecretDNASoftware on a subscription basis for 3-, 6-, and 12-month terms ($10.50, $15.50, $20.50).

About NewView Options:
Founded in 2008, NewView Options is a Provo, UT, firm specializing in the teaching and training of writing, for both beginners and the more advanced. The company is focused on promoting its propriety NewView approach to writing, communications, and teaching. NewView Options provides Education Discount rates for school districts. Call 1-801-373-0447, visit http://secretdnaofwritingessays.com/, or e-mail billdrew@richcontent.com.

Provo, UT – January 12, 2010 (PressReleasePoint) – The head of NewView Options, Bill Drew, makes a rather disturbing claim. “American students aren’t doing well on national writing tests.” He bases his assertion on recent studies that indicate writing skills are in decline in US schools. Drew goes on to say, “That’s why I created NewView Options, wrote The Secret DNA of Writing Essays-And Everything Else, engineered the NewView Essay Services computer program, and created a website to bring it all together.”

American students are not writing well? “That’s right,” Drew said. “In a 2003 press release ( http://bit.ly/NCWReport ), the National Commission on Writing (NCW) called for the immediate launch of a 5-year Writing Challenge to the Nation. The NCW was greatly concerned because the 2002 national results for high school writing tests were at the same low level as the same tests in 1998. Only 1 out of 5 high school seniors could write well enough to do acceptable writing (Proficient) in college. So the NCW called on all levels of government to provide more money, more computer equipment, more teachers, more training of teachers, and more time spent on writing by students in all classes.”

Did student writing improve after five years? “Not in the Proficient level, which is what the NCW is rightly concerned about,” said Drew. “The headline of an April 2008 press release ( http://bit.ly/2008ReportCard ) said, and I quote, ‘Scores increase in 2007 for both eighth- and twelfth-graders nationally.’ That’s misleading because, when you get down into the facts of the report, it says the increases were at the Basic level, not the Proficient level. The Basic level allows serious flaws in writing, and is just above being illiterate. The Proficient level is what counts, and that was at the center of concern for the NCW in its 2003 press release. The 2008 report said there was ‘no significant change since 2002′ for both eighth- and twelfth-graders in the Proficient level, although there was a barely significant increase over the 1998 scores.”

After 5 years, why aren’t we seeing a significant increase in writing skills across the nation? “Because schools teach only the forms of Rhetoric. Now, don’t get me wrong here,” smiles Drew. “You need form in writing, but if that’s all you’ve got, then you’ve got less than half the pie. You need the content that generates form. Writing forms don’t generate content. But that’s what’s being taught in schools across the nation – form, and rhetorical form at that, from a Greek culture that died around 2,000 years ago. There’s no theory and no process being taught in schools, to generate content across the board – except my NewView theory and methods, that is. Because of that 2008 report, I decided to make NewView – which is the real secret of the DNA of writing – available to the public.”

Drew reports that one high school teacher has been quite happily using his NewView principles for over twenty-five years (since just after Drew finished the Master’s thesis that is now the basis of his new e-book). A local elementary school teacher is also using it with his third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students, with excellent results. The company provides several testimonials on their website, at http://bit.ly/SecretDNAPraises.

Drew’s e-book, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else, is available now online at http://bit.ly/BuySecretDNABook for $8.50. It is also available on Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book for $9.50 (read all the positive reviews there). The companion software, NewView Essay Services, which automates part of the process in the e-book, is available at http://bit.ly/SecretDNASoftware on a subscription basis for 3-, 6-, and 12-month terms ($10.50, $15.50, $20.50).

About NewView Options:
Founded in 2008, NewView Options is a Provo, UT, firm specializing in the teaching and training of writing, for both beginners and the more advanced. The company is focused on promoting its propriety NewView approach to writing, communications, and teaching. NewView Options provides Education Discount rates for school districts. Call 1-801-373-0447, visit http://secretdnaofwritingessays.com/, or e-mail billdrew@richcontent.com.

Provo, UT – December 31, 2009 (PressReleasePivot) — The College Board says there’s a crisis in teaching writing to high school students. To help combat this crisis, the NewView Options company announces the release today of its breakthrough book on writing, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else. The company has also announced the release of computer software to complement the book, NewView Essay Services, designed to automate parts of the NewView e-book. The book and software work together to help students write better than ever before.

Bill Drew, CEO of NewView Options, says, “Yes, I realize that’s a pretty audacious title on the book. But, as the saying goes, ‘It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.’ And the book does ‘do it’ pretty well, with lots of notes at the back, providing historical and theoretical support for every assertion made in the book. But more importantly, the underlying writing principle of NewView really works with everything, and the book has plenty of examples to support each assertion.”

Drew owns up to the fact that he, himself, wrote the book. He said it’s based on research he did for his Master’s Thesis, NewView: A New Invention Method for the Essay (1982, Brigham Young University). It’s also based on Drew’s thirty years of experience, using its principles and rules to become an award-winning technical writer and editor.

If the NewView Principle of writing is so great, why did it take so long to get it into book form? “Well,” Drew says, “we’ve been raising eight kids, and that takes a lot of time, energy, and finances. I finally found the time and finances in the last year and a half to write Secret DNA. It’s been exhausting, but also rejuvenating, really.”

Drew claims that one high school teacher has been quite happily using his NewView principles to teach writing for over twenty-five years (since just after Drew finished his thesis). A local elementary school teacher is also using it with his students, with good results. The company offers a number of testimonials on their website, at http://bit.ly/SecretDNAPraises.

“There are some student testimonials, there, too,” says Drew, “as well as some from professional writers and college-level teachers. NewView makes writing easier because it actually requires students to cope forthrightly with ‘What’s new to the reader’ with a simple but powerful process that nobody else has access to, but everyone can learn, even just using the book. The software makes it more convenient to use when you’re writing something.”

Drew’s e-book, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else, is available now online at http://bit.ly/BuySecretDNABook for $8.50. It is also expected to be available for download through Amazon.com starting January 1, 2010. The companion software, NewView Essay Services, which automates part of the book, is available at http://bit.ly/SecretDNASoftware on a subscription basis for 3-, 6-, and 12-month terms ($10.50, $15.50, $20.50).

About NewView Options:
Founded in 2007, NewView Options is a Provo, UT, firm specializing in the teaching and training of writing, for both beginners and the more advanced. The company is focused on promoting its propriety NewView approach to writing, communications, and teaching. NewView Options provides Education Discount rates for school districts. Call 1-801-373-0447, visit http://secretdnaofwritingessays.com/, or e-mail billdrew@richcontent.com.